Oil Seeps Now Monitored By Satellite

New Scientist: Hunt for oil slicks boosted by free satellite images .

Natural oil oozing out from the seabed makes up nearly half of the oil that spills into the oceans. Now, a new technique that uses freely available satellite imagery can precisely locate and monitor every natural seep on Earth.

Cosmos Without Gravitation

"I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. In modern times the proofs of their convertibility have been accumulated to a very considerable extent, and a commencement made of the determination of their equivalent forces." -- Michael Faraday, physicist, 1845

"The long and constant persuasion that all the forces of nature are mutually dependent, having one common origin, or rather being different manifestations of one fundamental power, has often made me think on the possibility of establishing, by experiment, a connection between gravity and electricity …no terms could exaggerate the value of the relation they would establish.'' -- Michael Faraday, physicist, 1865

"What we call mass would seem to be nothing but an appearance, and all inertia to be of electromagnetic origin." -- Henri Poincaré, physicist, 1908

"Gravitation is an electromagnetic phenomenon." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946

Velikovsky, I., Cosmos Without Gravitation: Attraction, Repulsion and Electromagnetic Circumduction in the Solar System, 1946

1. The ingredients of the air—oxygen, nitrogen, argon and other gases—though not in a compound but in a mixture, are found in equal proportions at various levels of the atmosphere despite great differences in specific weights. ... Why, then, do not the atmospheric gases separate and stay apart in accordance with the specific gravities?

2. Ozone, though heavier than oxygen, is absent in the lower layers of the atmosphere, is present in the upper layers ... Nowhere is it asked why ozone does not descend of its own weight or at least why it is not mixed by the wind with other gases.

3. Water, though eight hundred times heavier than air, is held in droplets, by the millions of tons, miles above the ground. Clouds and mist are composed of droplets which defy gravitation.

...

7. Cyclones, characterized by low pressure and by winds blowing toward their centers, move counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. This movement of air currents in cyclonic vortices is generally explained as the effect of the earth’s rotation.

Anticyclones, characterized by high pressure and by winds blowing from their centers move clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. The movement of anticyclones has not been explained and is regarded as enigmatic.

Cyclones and anticyclones are considered a problem of fluidal motion with highest or lowest pressure in the center. As the movement of anticyclones cannot be explained by the mechanistic principles of gravitation and rotation, it must be concluded that the rotation of cyclones is also unexplained.

And the same is true for the cloud bands on Jupiter which have differential rotation.

a. Gravitation acts in no time. Laplace calculated that, in order to keep the solar system together, the gravitational pull must propagate with a velocity at least fifty million times greater than the velocity of light. A physical agent requires time to cover distance. Gravitation defies time.

b. Matter acts where it is not, or in abstentia, through no physical agent. This is a defiance of space. Newton was aware of this difficulty when he wrote in a letter to Bentley: “That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” Leibnitz opposed the theory of gravitation for this very reason.

"If Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy." -- Harlow Shapley, astronomer, 1946

"He [Velikovsky] invents electro-magnetic forces capable of doing precisely what he wants them to do. There is no scientific evidence whatever for the powers of these forces." -- Martin Gardner, mathematician, 1957

Immanuel Velikovsky

I have just listened to this man and read him for the first time, which given his intellectual greatness is most certainly due to censorship and poor educators, and all I can say is "wow." The religious reaction to his scientific claims was so fundamentalist and extreme that it has been the subject of psychological and psychiatric studies and papers in peer-reviewed journals and is what is known as the Velikovsky Affair.

Like Galileo, Velikovsky was ridiculed in his time by the mainstream religious establishment but time has vindicated Velikovsky.

Here are 3 Velikovsky claims.

Claim Number 1: Uniformitarianism is false.

"The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immutability of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to cultivate corals on the North Pole." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Claim Number 2: Venus is hot.

"And Venus must be hot if the history of the solar system is not the history of no change for billions of years. And Venus was found hot, not room temperature as was thought until 1959. In 1961 it was detected with radio means that it is like something like 600 Farenheit and Mariner 2 was sent out to find out true or not true? It was found that even more it is full 800 [degrees Farenheit]." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Claim Number 3: Jupiter emits radio waves.

"But then if there were events of this character, discharges between planets and so on, I put one of the most outrageous claims before the scientific readers, that in the solar system and in the universe generally, not just gravitation and inertia are the two forces of action but that also electricity and magnetism are participating in the mechanism, so the Lord was not just a watchmaker. The universe is not free of those forces with which the man makes his life easy already more than 100 years. They were unknown practically or little known in the time of Newton in the second half of the 17th century. But today we know that electricity and magnetism, these are not just small phenomena that we can repeat as a kind of a little trick in the lab, that they permeate every field from neurology into botony and chemistry and astronomy should not be free...and it was admitted by authorities that this was the most outrageous point in my claims. But the vengeance came early and swiftly. In 1960, already in 1955, radio noises from Jupiter were detected and this was one of the crucial tests that I offered for the truth of my theory. In 1958, the magnetosphere was discovered around the Earth, another claim. In 1960, the interplanetary magnetic field was discovered and solar plasma, so-called solar wind, moving rapidly along the magnetic lines and then it was discovered that the electromagnetic field of the Earth reaches the moon ." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

"Our debate ended on Friday, April 8, 1955, only nine days before Einstein’s death. I think I was the last person with whom he discussed a scientific problem. On that day I brought him the published news that Jupiter sends out radio noises; ten months earlier, in a letter to him, I had offered to stake our dispute on this my claim of an as yet undiscovered phenomenon..." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1976

The radio noises of Jupiter that were only predicted by Velikovsky are available on Youtube:



He was Albert Einstein's best friend and neighbor late in life and wrote a book on the subject titled Before The Day Breaks. Einstein and Velikovsky exchanged many letters which are available online.

Here are some highlights:

"Here is the year 1845. Leverrier in France and Adams in England, out of perturbations of Uranus calculated, to the exactness of one degree of arc, the presence of a yet unseen planet. Both of them assumed that a planet of a size not larger than that of Uranus travels on an orbit at a distance dictated by Bode’s law. Neptune is actually of the size of Uranus, but the mean distance between their orbits is not ca. 1,750,000,000 miles, as Bode’s law required, but only ca. 1,000,000,000 miles; thus the error is equal to ascribing to Neptune a triple mass. The discovery of Pluto did not solve the conflict between the theory and the fact and caused also conflicting estimates of Pluto’s mass. Thus the finding of the planetary stations in relation to a chart of fixed stars is not enough; if the theory is true the distances must also be correct. And still the discovery of Neptune is regarded as the strongest proof of the Newtonian theory of celestial motions.

Now in the same 1845, the year of this triumph, Leverrier calculated also the anomaly of Mercury, and by this caused to think that the Newtonian law of gravitation may be not precisely true. Leverrier first thought of some planet moving inside the Mercurial orbit or of a possible unequal distribution of the mass in the sun. You have used the fact of the anomaly to prove that the space is curving in the presence of a mass. About the same time—in 1913—G. E. Hale published his paper on “The general magnetic field of the sun” (Contr. M. Wilson Obs., #71), in which he estimated the general magnetic field of the sun as of 50 Gauss intensity. At this intensity “under certain conditions electromagnetic forces are much stronger than gravitation.” (Alfven) The last named author in his “cosmical Electro-dynamics” (Oxford, 1950, p. 2) shows that a hydrogen atom at the distance of the earth from the sun and moving with the earth’s orbital velocity, if ionized, is acted upon by the solar magnetic field ten thousand times stronger than by the solar gravitational field."

Here is a May 1966 speech he gave to a parochial school in mp3 format known as From Book to Book and Land to Land. In it he uses his now famous expression "Collective Amnesia."

Imagination Vs. Measurement

Math Vs. Physical Science or Imagimetry Vs. Geometry.

There was a time (back in the days of philosophy) when geometry actually meant "Earth Measure." Measurement is an empirical physical science. It's truths are determined empirically through measurement of physical material. Today, geometry doesn't measure anything. Geometry has become Imagimetry. Instead of measuring the Earth with a ruler as geometry once did, Imagimetry on the other hand measures imaginary mathematical space with a magic ruler that has no defined units of measurement.

Where did science go wrong? One word: Newton. "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" are not "Empirical Conclusions of Physical Science." Science went wrong when it started worshipping Newtonian "absolute, true, and mathematical time" while ignoring the fact that Kantian mathematical time is a priori and not a physical object in itself. Physical "relative, apparent, and common time" must be measured with actual units. "Absolute, true, and mathematical" time on the other hand has no units because it is imaginary.

"Nothing exists until it is measured." -- Niels Bohr, physicist, 1930

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." -- Nikola Tesla, physicist, 1934

"The elements of the physical reality cannot be determined by a priori philosophical considerations [aka mathematics], but must be found by an appeal to results of experiments and measurements." -- Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, physicists, 1935

Stephen Smith: What is truth?

Astronomical research in the virtual realm [aka imagination] instigates foregone conclusions [aka a priori mathematical principles].

The Thunderbolts Picture of the Day has never considered questions that involve the search for subjective meaning in the universe to be necessary when analyzing the observations that NASA and other research groups provide. It is enough in most instances to draw correspondence between the theories proposed in peer-reviewed journals and the concepts embodied in Electric Universe [EU] hypotheses. The so-called anomalies in consensus opinions tend to disappear in most cases when EU theory is brought to bear on the questions.

A recent article in the scientific press highlights the disparity between the conclusions that should be drawn from observations and those that are drawn from within the imagination.

"Jupiter has a rocky core that is more than twice as large as previously thought, researchers announced today."

On its face the headline is not unusual and seems to indicate that evidence has been uncovered supporting a previously held theory. Not only that, the previous theory is tacitly assumed to have been correct because new information is enabling them to amplify its conclusions. However, when the announcement is fleshed-out the headline has no basis in evidence at all:

"Burkhard Militzer, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues ran computer simulations to look at conditions inside Jupiter... With information gleaned from these simulations, the researchers developed another computer model..."

Shell Breaks Subsea Drilling Record

Shell oil well in Gulf sets undersea record. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

HOUSTON - Shell Oil Co. said Tuesday it has set a world water-depth record by drilling and completing an oil well in 9,356 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

The well is part of Shell's Perdido Development project about 200 miles south of Houston. It easily topped the previous record of 6,950 feet - also set by Shell in the Gulf of Mexico. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has completed natural-gas wells in about 9,000 feet of water in the Gulf.

Production at Perdido is scheduled to begin around 2010. Shell says the project, which dates to a lease sale in 1996, will be capable of producing 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day.

Deepwater drilling in the Gulf dates to 1979 when Shell began production, but development really didn't take off until the 1990s as technological advancements made it more feasible.

Shell didn't disclose Perdido's costs, but such ventures can cost billions of dollars.

Nassim Taleb On Charlie Rose

NASA Observes Comets Then Ignores The Observations

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." -- Sir Winston Churchill

NASA's Swift Looks To Comets For A Cool View.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2008) — NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite rocketed into space in 2004 on a mission to study some of the highest-energy events in the universe. The spacecraft has detected more than 380 gamma-ray bursts, fleeting flares that likely signal the birth of a black hole in the distant universe. In that time, Swift also has observed 80 exploding stars and studied six comets.

Comets? ... Comets are "dirty snowballs" made of frozen gases mixed with dust.

Comets are dirty snowballs? I wonder why they haven't melted in the sun during the past million years. It looks more like a unicorn than a snowball.

X-rays come from superhot plasmas.

Eureka!!!

What do cold comets have in common with exploding stars or the birth of black holes?

Good question. I suspect either plasma or else absolutely nothing.

"It was a big surprise in 1996 when the NASA-European ROSAT mission showed that comet Hyakutake was emitting X-rays," says Dennis Bodewits, a NASA Postdoctural Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "After that discovery, astronomers searched through ROSAT archives. It turns out that most comets emit X-rays when they come within about three times Earth's distance from the sun."

Hmmm, they emit x-rays but they don't melt. Sounds like the snowballs I know. A database full of comets observed and every time they emit x-rays it's a surprise? When will it stop being a surprise?

Bodewits is working with the Swift team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to study comets using data from the spacecraft's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) and X-Ray Telescope (XRT). "Swift is an excellent platform for studying dynamic processes in comets," he says.

Ultraviolet wavelengths let astronomers identify the chemical composition of the comet's atmosphere, observe the structure of dust emission, and identify the rotation of the comet's icy nucleus. X-rays reveal the structure of the comet's gas and the state of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that flows from the sun at speeds upwards of 900,000 mph.

Plasma? What's that all about? Ah nevermind, just forget it. Let's talk about gravity some more.

Swift's UVOT captured a striking sequence that shows unresolved blobs of dust trailing from a crumbling comet.

Dust or plasma? Must be dust.